Beta Progress and Latest Updates

Testpad has been live in its free Beta for 5 weeks now and has been getting some great feedback. Testpad's editing speed and the mobile access seem to be going down especially well. Many thanks to those of you that have been sending in your comments and suggestions. Where possible, I've applied that feedback in the update that went live this afternoon.

Updates

So what's changed? Here are the highlights:

The plain-text 'source' behind the library scripts are now available on github. It's still very early days for the library of examples, and this is an experiment to see if it makes the submission of edits and whole new scripts simpler. If you'd like to suggest a checklist for inclusion, just fork the 'testpad/library' repository, add the new scripts, and send testpad a pull request with your deltas.

Each example in the library now has a discussion thread at end of the script. So if github isn't your bag, you can always make helpful suggestions in the comments instead.

There has been some confusion as to when exactly auto-save happens, especially with respect to whether it's safe to navigate off the current page. So to that end, the script-editing page now shows a mini-status in the top left-hand corner which shows one of 'unsaved', 'saving' or 'saved' depending on the current status. I've also added a prompt to warn you if you attempt to leave the page before edits have made it to the server. However, if you've got a half-decent network connection, auto-save should be near instantaneous and this should rarely be an issue.

Shift-Enter now makes a new row above the current row; especially useful if you want to make a new first row.

The triangles showing open/closed sections of test cases are now clickable. Plus, as before, you can use the spacebar as a shortcut to toggle them open/closed.

Some tweaks to the HTTP caching logic to try to ensure the data behind the script page (i.e. the script and its results) are not cached when you use browser-back to come back onto the script-edit page. This seems to behave perfectly in Firefox, IE and Safari so far, with just Chrome being stubborn about loading it from cache.

And many small bug fixes. Thanks to those that pointed some of these out!

Next steps

Next up, which you can probably guess if you've been following @testpadapp, is to move towards an official launch of Testpad complete with the pricing plans.

Welcome to Testpad

Testpad is an online test management tool that reinvents manual testing with an efficient and more natural checklist approach. Easier than hacking away with spreadsheets. More agile than heavyweight test case management. Find out more on the homepage: